


A big boy, now

by kangeiko



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-19
Updated: 2007-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-08 13:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean & childhood, for bluerosefairy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A big boy, now

Dean never had monsters under his bed as a baby. Well, okay, that's a lie: he had monsters, but they never bothered him. His dad always made sure to chase them out, and to lock the closet door. It was a big, elaborate ritual just before bedtime and it worked because routine is what babies need. Dean knows this. He figured it out ages ago, even before his mother had explained to him that he wasn't allowed to keep Sam awake past his bedtime. Disappointingly, almost all time turned out to be Sammy's bedtime. Babies sure slept a lot.

 

Anyhow, he'd helped out a friend at school who'd been having some monster problems of her own. Not the bed-kind, as it turned out, but the potty kind. Dean was much too old to be bothered by monsters - they only bothered babies, and he _wasn't_ a baby - but maybe girls were different. So, he borrowed his dad's special Monster Catching Glove, and went into Emily's bathroom, and looked in all the nooks and crannies that a monster might have hidden in. After about ten minutes, he emerged triumphant. "No monsters in there," he told her, reassuringly. "You must be too old for them." She seemed inordinately pleased at this, and Dean puffed up with pride. Hadn't he just saved a girl in this dress? His mom certainly thought so, and told her friends about it, which puzzled Dean a little. Emily had most certainly not been wearing _that_ dress when he'd saved her, but his mom's friends laughed when he pointed this out.

 

Maybe it was a girl thing.

 

Anyway. That night, he did a check of his own room before bedtime, crawling right underneath the bed to make sure that the bogeyman hadn't followed him from Emily's house, and that there weren't any vampires or goblins hiding in his toybox. Reassured by the continued lack of monsters, he went to bed and slept soundly.

 

See, the thing is, Dean is too old for monsters. They only want babies - his dad had told him that big boys don't taste nice. And Dean is not a baby anymore. Stupidly, he thought that this meant the monsters had gone away. Stupid, yes, because he'd forgotten that there _was_ a baby in the house, sleeping just a few meters away. So Dean didn't taste nice anymore, and no monsters wanted to eat him. And wasn't it stupid to think that, just because his daddy had protected him as a baby, he'd do the same thing for Sammy? Wasn't it stupid to save Emily, and leave his own brother to the bogeyman? What kind of big brother did that?

 

The night the monsters came back into Dean's life, he was asleep in his room. He heard the noise - yelling, it sounded like, and crashing, like he'd heard over at a friend's house one night and tried to ignore. _There are no monsters_, he told himself firmly, as he slowly crept out of bed. _I'm not a baby_.

 

But Sammy was. Oh, Sammy was still a baby. And where had his daddy been while they came to eat Sammy up? Where had _Dean_ been, the big brother, the big sleepyhead, the big _baby_, asleep in his room?

 

He hugged the baby to his chest, kissing its cheek awkwardly. "Don't worry, Sammy," he said, as firmly as he could. His chest and his throat still hurt from the smoke and from the running, and he couldn't see his daddy at all. "I'll keep you safe from the monsters. I promise."

 

 

*

 

fin


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